Jill Bialosky’s Poetry Will Save Your Life, like Pamela Paul’s recent My Life with Bob, is a memoir-through-reading. Bialosky takes an impressionistic and chronological approach, allotting a brief chapter to each episode in her life and linking her experiences to one or two poems, which are reproduced in full, that resonated especially strongly for her. She is not writing for people fascinated by the intricacies of meter or form, so academic readers and poets will find much to quibble with here, and may find the largely thematic readings both limited and, in several instances, seriously misleading.

Trying to convey why a particular poem or book matters can be a frustrating experience, devolving into clichés or generalizations. I will never read Hermann Hesse because the merits of Siddhartha were extolled in exhaustive detail by bookish but otherwise attractive young men who found the protagonist "relatable." Best to trust more experienced and articulate readers to persuade you of the merits of their favourites. Ideally, those expert readers illuminate rather than paraphrase.

Bialosky is an accomplished poet and editor, and she has published a previous memoir, about her younger sister’s suicide. Much of this new book revisits events and people in observations that seem less insightful, perhaps because of the fracturing of her story into disparate segments.

I wanted to hear more about her mother, who lost her own mother very young, was widowed by her mid-twenties, re-married disastrously, and then never recovered from her youngest daughter’s suicide. There are several deeply empathetic passages about their relationship.. One of the lesser-known poems that Bialosky includes in an array of mostly-familiar works (Keats, Dickinson, Bishop, Plath, Lowell) is Stanley Plumly’s “My Mother’s Feet.” Yet the leadenness of Bialosky’s assessment—“‘Feet are intimate. They’re mostly hidden underneath stockings, or inside slippers, just as our mother’s (sic?) interior lives are concealed”—not only neglects to add anything to the experience of reading the poem, it flattens Plumly’s evocative imagery and word choices. The thumbnail biographies of the poets provide limited context and worse, according to reviewer William Logan, are not entirely original to the author.

One section of the book, though, which deals with grief and loss, and Bialosky’s two premature infants who do not survive, is quietly devastating. Discussing Eavan Boland’s “The Pomegranate” and Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son,” she writes, “Perhaps we turn to poetry because it can fathom and hold the inexplicable, the gasp between words, the emotional hues impossible to capture in everyday speech or conversation.” The idea of a “gasp” rather than a gap between words is rather lovely, and this is a laudable attempt to explain why poetry matters so vitally to some readers.